About Jacques Callot

One of the first artists to focus solely on the graphic arts, Jacques Callot produced drawings and etchings that drew influence from Flemish art and Mannerist works in Roman churches. Callot’s career began in Florence in 1612 when he started work in the Medici court, where he was employed to make pictorial records of entertainments such as fairs and festivals, and where he also drew and etched courtiers, beggars, and other characters, excelling particularly at caricatures. Returning to his native France in the latter end of his career, Callot’s work became markedly more sober as he documented the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War in his “Miseries of War” series, which would continue to influence the artistic representation of conflict social injustice into the 19th and 20th centuries.